Review: “American Icons” showcases the exceptional melting pot that is the Joffrey and American dance

The Joffrey Ballet’s early years have been enshrined in American legend, as the small troupe toured the country in a station wagon full of entrepreneurial postwar spirit and youthful enthusiasm.

Founded in 1956 by Robert Joffrey, son of a Pashtun father and an Italian mother, and second-generation Italian immigrant Gerald Arpino, the 70-year-old company continues to draw exceptional dancers from around the world to Chicago.

The Joffrey is, quintessentially, a company of immigrants in an American city powered by immigration.

The Joffrey’s “American Icons” program, running through March 1 at the Lyric, is, appropriately, a melting pot, too. Showcasing work by Joffrey and Arpino, plus dances by founding company dancer Glen Tetley and iconic modern choreographer Martha Graham, the evening’s collection evokes Old Vienna, Ancient Greece, Belle Époque Paris and the Catholic Church.

Collectively, the works communicate a modern American perspective on the Old World, and they represent an essential Americanness even while expressing the statelessness of dance.

Arpino’s “Kettentanz” (1971), set to a suite of waltzes, polkas and galops by Johann Strauss Sr. and Johann Mayer, establishes the frisky tone that defines much of the program. Across eight variations the dancers prance and flirt, partnering with a light touch through at times impossibly brisk footwork.

Gayeon Jung and Evan Boersma (on opening night) share a waltzing duet marked by astonishing lifts, as Jung alternately leaps into Boersma’s arms and then seems to almost fly away. Elsewhere, the men aim to outdo each other with bravura tours and cabrioles, and a vivacious Ao Wang practically levitates as she bounces through a rapid-fire duet with Jung.

With Jack Mehler’s giant tree looming upstage, it’s as though the balls of Vienna are removed from the drawing room and restaged as a frolic in the bracing country air.

Graham’s 1962 piece “Secular Games” continues this loose and playful energy. Ostensibly set on a Greek island beach, the piece draws less explicitly from myth than Graham’s early work (no minotaurs, no Medea). Still, her modernist hallmarks endure.

Here six men, barechested, preen, stretch, arc, and contract like a clutch of peacocks, jousting their way through sets of stag leaps and other Graham angularities. As their torsos flex and ripple in courtship and competition, they manipulate their female partners into gloriously off-kilter shapes, arabesques askew and elbows akimbo.

But while all in all, this is a showcase of athletic masculine virility, a pas de deux for Boersma and Olivia Duryea pulls the work in a classical direction, as the pair moves together in fluid unity.

An excerpt from Joffrey’s “Postcards” (1980) is similarly lighthearted, enriched by the surprise appearance of mezzo-soprano Camille Robles. Clad in white, Anais Bueno and Stefan Gonçalvez execute a sinuous and youthful pas de deux. Bueno’s port de bras are exquisitely expressive, and the brief work feels both romantic and fresh. Robles’s rendition of a Satie chanson evokes the Parisian café setting and leaves the audience longing for more.

The mood shifts dramatically with the final work: Glen Tetley’s “Voluntaries,” created in 1973 for the Stuttgart Ballet as a memorial for his friend John Cranko. If the rest of “American Icons” channels America’s youthful exuberance, “Voluntaries” is a move into maturity, alternately elegiac and hopeful, grappling with mortality and meaning.

“Voluntaries” begins in silence and stillness, Joffrey principals Victoria Jaiani and Dylan Gutierrez in white unitards center stage against the backdrop of a glowing orb. They move forward and, as Jaiani extends her endless leg, the first chord of Poulenc’s “Concerto for Organ, Strings and Timpani” crashes down, breaking the spell, and she is lifted, spiraling toward the sky.

With the full company on stage, the work is a perpetual motion machine, the dancers moving in unison and in canon through motifs surely grueling in their technical demands. Tetley’s choreography is classical in essence but requires the dancers to twist and contract along unexpected meridians as they breathe through the endlessly iterating arabesques and sidelong tilts of modern dance.

The men eat up the stage with liquid leaps; the women are swept into daring lifts, piking overhead, diving to their partners’ ankles, and repeatedly borne aloft in narrow X’s reminiscent of the Crucifixion — an image later made explicit as the dancers repeatedly extend their arms, birdlike, into a downturned cross.

The religious, or spiritual, overtones are clear, with the organ blasts contributing to the air of majesty. As an exploration of grief, “Voluntaries” is emotional and expansive. With a purity of movement and intent, there is nothing coy happening here, just pain, joy and transcendence. The whole evening delivers, but in the stunning hands — and legs — of the Joffrey dancers, “Voluntaries” lifts the program to the heavens.